Genshin Impact: What Factors Might Affect Sales For a Banner?¶
First: What is Genshin Impact?¶
Genshin Impact is a free-to-play game that entails the genres of action, Role-Playing (RPG) and Open-World. It is also a 'gacha' game: where in-game currency is used to test one's luck in obtaining a special rated character that helps improve their account. The game was created by MiHoYo (now Hoyoverse) from Shanghai, China.
The game is currently available on iOS, Android for mobile, several compatible PC units, and the PlayStation 4 and 5 with a release due on the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2022.
As stated on Wikipedia: "Prior to its release the game had over 10 million registrations, with over half of that from outside China. According to some, the game was the biggest international release of any Chinese video game. In the lead up to release, the game won the Tokyo Game Show Media Awards 2020 public poll, ranking first among 14 other games."
Genshin Impact grew rapidly since its launch, taking the game industry by storm one may say, and making a name for itself around the world.
The game generates revenue through its limited event wish durations (character banners as we call them) and has recently started to allow the option of "buying skins" or alternate outfits for playable characters. It also has a Battle Pass system in place where players can complete challenges or objectives over the course of 6 weeks for rewards.
In this project, we will attempt to look at and analyze trends between various factors that go into play when looking at the success of a promotional character.
So, why care about a random game on the App Store?¶
As seen in the graphic above, Genshin Impact is estimated to have the highest first year gaming revenue in recent times, slightly edging past Fortnite in the Earnings Estimate. To the average person it may look like "an anime game" yet it also surpasses "mainstream" gaming such as GTA V and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare when it comes to first-year sales. This is indicative of how strong the launch of this game was.
As an outsider to this game, it will be an interesting experience to gain insight on how the gacha system works on Genshin Impact and some potential factors behind the success of a promotional character while also getting to see some clips that we have recorded of gameplay to maybe loop you in!
If you are a player, you may get to learn how some others make their in-game decisions and their rationale behind it.
Genshin Impact uses a summon system as previously mentioned to obtain promotional, limited time characters.
All characters in Genshin Impact have a rating of either "4-star" or "5-star". Promotional characters belong to the 5-star or 5* category. Barring the five characters Jean, Qiqi, Mona, Keqing and Diluc plus the Main Protagonist (Aether if Male or Lumine if Female), every character is limited and are available for a 3-week period only. Weapons also follow a similar categorization of 4* and 5* but they have a slightly different summon system despite using the same summon currency as the promotional 5* character.
If someone says "I'm rolling this banner" it means they are using their summon currency for the promotional character or weapon of this patch.
Many Genshin players use this website called 
We will start looking at factors that go into rolls starting with the seiyuus (voice actors/actresses) behind the characters.
Twitter was our social media platform of choice when it came to scraping the so called drip marketing post data. We chose to use English Twitter because there was the most drip marketing posts available. The goal here is to be able to get a general idea of a character's popularity based on the number of likes and retweets on their intial reveal post in which we value by adding these two quantities together. This way, we would later be able to use this data for analyis.
Another way to extract data that we came up with was to create a Google Form survey. We shared this form to about 20 different Discord servers of Genshin players to gather surveyers to fill the data. We made sure we posted it within the Mains servers for all the characters in our dataset to level out any biases. The purpose of this was to get a local sample in relevance to genshin wishes. For each character in our dataset from Hu Tao to Kamisato Ayaka, we ask if the surveyer rolled on their banner or not. If they did, they are prompted to check off as many of the following reasons as to why: Character Design, Gameplay, Meta Relevance, In-Game Lore, & Voice Acting Cast. If not, they don't get asked anything else about that specific character.
